December 19, 2016

Miniature in the Mail #47: "Under the Laguna Freeway"

"Under the Laguna Freeway," 4x6in., oil on masonite

People say, sometimes intuit—in California and in Canada, it's one of the strong common threads—that nature is therapeutic, restorative, a wormhole back to our more congenital habitat. But every time I escape, mostly to get a reprieve from cars and digital devices, or to walk the kids, I end up coming back to the same old drab structures that signal modern living, like early explorers that just couldn't lose sight of the coastline.

This view under a freeway, curiously, with trash thrown out of vehicles above and scattered about, a thunderous noise, and slightly vandalized signs and walls, struck as me as rougher and more feral than the carefully tended paths where I was supposed to experience wilderness.